Curl it did, in thick, crow-black ringlets. But at the moment, no one would guess that.
“What do you reckon about my hair, Sedgewick?” James said. “Strong soap, or do you want to try scraping it off first?”
“I reckon I wished you’d decided on a wig instead, sir,” Sedgewick said.
“Too easy to lose in a tussle,” James said. “I had no way to be sure her gondoliers wouldn’t heave me overboard first and ask questions later. I think she’s hired the biggest gondoliers in Venice. That Uliva? Hands the size of hams. Water wouldn’t damage this, though.”
“She must expect trouble, signore,” Zeggio said. “The house is protected very well. Two porters. One on the canal side and one on the land side. We have tried to get into it, but for us this is impossible. Even if we could get in, we do not know what to look for and where to look. How will you do it?”
“I won’t,” said James.
Zeggio’s dark eyes widened. “No?”
James laughed. “She thought she was so clever, leaving me in Countess Benzoni’s clutches. I could have escaped and followed La Bonnard—but to what purpose? When she wants to be rid of a man, she gets rid of him. She’d had enough of me. There was nothing to be gained by plaguing her. There was a great deal to be gained, though, by listening to what people said of her after she left.”
“Prince Lurenze went after her,” Sedgewick told Zeggio. “Where did it get him?”
James had not followed her but Sedgewick and Zeggio had. They blended in easily among the gondoliers and servants idling about St. Mark’s.
“I took advantage of the opportunity she offered me,” James said. “The Countess Benzoni is charming, lively, and most informative. I found out more from her in half an hour than I should have learned from Bonnard in a week. This, combined with my own observations, tells me what to do.”
He looked up from the mirror into Zeggio’s eager face.
Once I felt the same zest for adventure, the same zest for the hunt, James thought. Where did it go? When did it go?
“Everyone chases her,” James said. “She knows how to deal with that. So she’s going to chase me.” He smiled grimly. “Until I catch her.”
Chapter 3
I’m fond myself of solitude or so,
But then, I beg it may be understood,
By solitude I mean a sultan’s not
A hermit’s, with a haram for a grot.
Lord Byron
Don Juan, Canto the First
Two nights later
On nights like this Francesca truly appreciated her freedom. She had gone first to the theater, then to the Caffè Florian, and now—Giulietta having parted from her for an assignation—she was going home, where she might sit up for a time, reading.
She would not have to make conversation or stifle yawns. She would not have to be clever or amusing or enticing or even agreeable.
Tonight she need please only herself.
She sat in the gondola, her chin resting on her hand, watching the familiar line of palazzi near her house float past. It was delicious, sometimes, not to have to talk or even think, to simply savor the moment and her surroundings: the beautiful houses, which had stood here for centuries; the quiet of the canal, the same quiet it had known for centuries, too; the peace of this strange city.
None of the cities she’d visited since she’d left England had soothed her as Venice did. She had no trouble understanding why Lord Byron had been, in a sense, reborn here.
At present, she lacked nothing in her life, she thought. She was financially secure. She was free—in ways she couldn’t have dreamed of in her old life. She had a friend in whom she could confide.
She needed nothing—except perhaps a lover who would give her a few hours’ pleasure and go away and leave her in peace. Or perhaps a dog would be better, she thought with a smile. In lieu of carnal pleasure, a canine would offer unquestioning love and devotion.
But dogs could not buy her diamonds. Or rubies, emeralds, sapphires, pearls, peridots, amethysts, or any of their fellows.
She’d have to make do with a lover. She laughed softly at the thought.
As the gondola neared her house, she looked up toward the Ca’ Munetti. Arnaldo had told her that the new tenant was hiring more servants. Several boats had arrived with supplies for the house. Of the tenant himself Arnaldo had learned little more. The gondolier Zeggio had claimed his master wished for privacy. He’d come to study with the monks and to concentrate on his work, whatever that was. He might go to the theater on occasion, or visit a church or a palazzo, to view the works of art. But he did not wish to attend the conversazioni—Venice’s salons, or what was left of them—or go to parties or to the hotels to dine with friends.
He was reclusive, then, but not precisely a hermit, she decided. He was, her sources said, about Lord Byron’s age but “perhaps more handsome.” The shadowy form she’d glimpsed from time to time in the Ca’ Munetti’s windows was that of a tall man.
The rest was left to her imagination. And in imagining him, she lost awareness of her surroundings.
She heard the faint plash of oars but thought nothing of it.
The night was dark, and the gondoliers didn’t see the danger, either, until a minute too late.
It happened so quickly.
A noise, the gondola rocking.
She looked to the front of the felze in time to see the man heave over the gondola’s side, leap up at Uliva, and push him into the water. It happened in the blink of an eye. She tried to scream, but only a squeak came out. Her throat was tight and her heart beat so fast, she couldn’t breathe properly, couldn’t find the wind to cry for help.
She was aware of movement, more rocking. A thunk, then a splash. She scrambled up from her seat, but the attacker shoved her back into the cabin and fell upon her.
She punched and kicked but he was too big, a great barrel of a brute. The stench of unwashed body clogged her nostrils.
His hands went round her throat. She clawed at them, struggled and squirmed, but it was like trying to move an elephant. She tried to thrust her knee in his groin, as she’d been taught to do. He was too heavy. She couldn’t move her legs. He muttered an obscenity while his hands tightened round her neck.
James had come home half an hour earlier. He’d stripped down to shirt and trousers and donned his dressing gown. A glass of wine in his hand, he was standing at the darkened window next to Zeggio when it happened.
Zeggio had been watching the small boat—one house down from theirs—since midnight, he explained.
“I do not like it,” he told James. “But I do not like to make trouble and call attention to us. What do you think, signore?”
“I don’t like it, either,” James said.
He’d scarcely uttered the words when her gondola swam into view. It was mere yards from the water gate of the Palazzo Neroni when the small boat moved out from the shadows.
James made out two figures in the rowboat.
It moved swiftly toward the gondola.
And swiftly attacked, taking the gondoliers unawares.
The man rowing the small boat reached over and grabbed the side of the gondola. He spread his legs to hold the rowboat steady while his accomplice climbed onto the gondola and made straight for the front gondolier. He pushed Uliva into the water and without the slightest pause, turned, hurtled over the cabin, and attacked the other gondolier, knocking him into the water.
Then he went for her.
It all took less than a minute.
But in less than a minute James was moving, throwing off the dressing gown and kicking off his slippers. He flung open the window, stepped onto the balcony, and jumped off.
Francesca’s accoster grunted, relaxed his grip slightly, and began grinding his pelvis against hers. Despite the layers of clothes between them—her pelisse, gown, petticoat, and shift, and his filthy rags—she was all too aware of his erection…and how small a chance she had of stopping him from doing what he
meant to do.
She was too afraid to be sickened, too busy gasping for breath and trying not to lose consciousness. He lay atop her, a great, stinking ox. His breath was foul, hot on her face.
She was dimly aware of sounds outside but her mind couldn’t sort them out. She clawed with one hand at the thick fingers on her neck while with the other she tried to find something—a weapon of some kind, any kind.
James hit the water next to the rowboat. As soon as he came up, he caught hold of the side and heaved, throwing all his weight into it. The little boat tipped over, and the rower went over, too, with a curse and a shriek.
James pulled himself onto the gondola, and charged into the felze. The brute attacking her jerked up his head in surprise. James shoved his forearm across his throat and squeezed, trapping him tight in the crook of his arm. The villain was big, and he thrashed madly, but not for long. A few last, feeble twitches, and he went limp.
James dragged him out of the cabin and pushed him into the canal and watched the dark form sink beneath the water.
He returned to her. She sprawled half in the seat, half on the floor, her skirts bunched up above her garters, her stockings sagging. She was panting, one hand at her throat.
He reached to help her up. She recoiled from his outstretched hand. She rolled to one side, grabbing a bottle. She threw it at him. He ducked, and the bottle sailed harmlessly into the canal.
Relief coursed through him, as cool as the water streaming down his body. The black, consuming rage ebbed.
He set his fists on his hips and laughed. He had to. It was all too absurd, and he most absurd of all, in his shirtsleeves, dripping wet.
“Ma amo solo te, dolcezza mia,” he said.
But I love only you, my sweet.
“Vai al diavolo!” she gasped.
Go to the devil, in Italian with an amusing English accent.
“That,” he said in English, “is both rude and ungrateful, after I have spoiled my best trousers on your account. Or perhaps you’ve reason to be ungrateful?” He pushed dripping black curls back from his face. “Did I mistake the situation, and interrupt a bout of lovemaking? Like it rough, do you?”
She scrambled up to a sitting position, tugging her skirts down over long, shapely legs. In the dim lamplight her face was ghostly pale, her eyes great, dark hollows in her face.
“Rough?” she said blankly. “Rough?” She shook her head, like one waking from a dream. “You’re English?”
He was real. This was real.
She was cold and shaking and bile was rising in her throat. She was going to be sick.
Eyes fixed on the apparition before her, Francesca dragged in air and tried to make her mind work.
He couldn’t be real.
Greek and Roman statues looked like that, not living men. Mythical gods and demigods looked like that, not mortal men.
But he was breathing. Hard. She watched his big chest rise and fall under his sopping shirt. The sodden linen was merely a veil clinging to his skin, hiding nothing. She could discern every taut line of muscle in his powerful shoulders and arms and torso. The wet trousers hugged a narrow waist and hips and long, muscled legs.
Very long legs. Had she ever met a man, a living man, as tall as this? Or did he simply seem so, towering over her as she lay sprawled in the cabin’s seat?
Her first impression was of a handsome, strong-featured face, its expression so cold that it might have been chiseled in marble. The forbidding countenance was at odds with the mop of wet curls falling over his forehead.
She felt a wash of cold, then potent heat, a chill again, and heat again. All the while her head spun, trying to make sense of a world turned wildly awry and trying to make sense of him, while he shifted so easily from one language to another. At one moment he was indisputably Italian, in the next, incurably English.
She let her gaze drop to the hand he’d stretched out to her. Now it hung at his side, a long, strong hand that, only a moment before, had reduced a great barrel of a man to a rag doll. He’d thrown the big villain’s body over the side as casually as he might have flung a rat.
Who are you?
What are you?
She forced her gaze upward, back to his face, so hard and pitiless a moment ago. It was still without warmth, though he’d laughed, and the smile yet lingered at his mouth.
She wanted him to dive back into the water. He wasn’t human. He was a merman, part of a nightmare she wanted desperately to wake up from. Let him go back to his native element, let him vanish like the apparition he had to be.
But he’d saved her life.
Whoever, whatever he was, he’d saved her life.
In all her seven and twenty years, no man had ever come to her rescue before.
Who are you? she wanted to scream. What are you?
But what came out was the silliest question of all: “You’re English?”
James had already decided how to play it, though he hadn’t planned for this scenario.
“To a point,” he said.
She gazed dazedly about her. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Who were they? Why?”
Her voice was hoarse, and he knew that in better light, he’d see the imprint of her attacker’s thick fingers on her throat.
He felt the rage rebuilding—the lunatic fury he’d felt a moment ago.
Lunatic, indeed.
He had a temper: He was half Italian, after all.
But temper—emotion of any kind—had no place in his work. Hotheads failed. Hotheads got their comrades tortured and killed. Hotheads ended up with missing digits, missing limbs. They were left to rot in rat-infested holes or buried alive or staked under the desert sun. Hotheads came to a thousand bad ends, and the end rarely came quickly and painlessly.
Settle down, he told himself. Think.
She, clearly, hadn’t dreamt she was in danger. He, clearly, hadn’t dreamt it, either. His superiors had offered no hint. She didn’t understand. Neither did he.
Not that this would be the first time he’d been told only part of the story.
They always made it sound so simple—Get the letters—and it always turned into un mare di merda, a sea of excrement.
He scanned the immediate vicinity. “No sign of the would-be killers or rapists or thieves or whatever they were,” he said. “No sign of their boat, either. With any luck, they’ve drowned.”
He didn’t tell her it wasn’t good luck.
He didn’t tell her he should have taken more care.
He should have used another method to immobilize the one he’d pulled off her. He should have made sure to keep him alive, to hold onto him and question him. James would have enjoyed the interrogation.
But there was the swine, chortling while he tortured her, choking her slowly and grinding his groin—doubtless crawling with vermin and disease—against her.
James had charged in like a mad bull.
So that one had got away—or, equally likely, was dead—and the other was either sinking to the bottom of the canal or had got away, too.
Clumsy work. Not setting a good example for Zeggio, going off half-cocked like that, a bloody damned Sir Baconhead, saving fair maidens from dragons.
Still, it was done and couldn’t be undone.
James tensed as two heads popped out of the water. Then he recognized Uliva.
“Ah, here are your fellows,” he said. “I guessed they’d be along soon enough.”
The episode had taken a minute or two, start to finish.
He’d sized up her gondoliers the other night, and understood they were men to be reckoned with. The attackers probably hadn’t known that.
Whatever the villains knew or didn’t know, James couldn’t leave it to the gondoliers to rescue her.
As it was, he might have reached her too late. It took no time at all to kill somebody, as he well knew.
He watched her two stalwart boatmen climb into the gondola. “Get the lady into the house, quickly,” he told them in I
talian. “Make sure to pour some brandy into her.”
He moved to the side of the boat. It had drifted a ways from their respective domiciles, but not so very far, and this was not the Grand Canal but a rio, a smaller side canal. He was already wet. He’d a short, easy swim home ahead of him. The cold water would do him good.
He needed to get away. He wasn’t happy with his performance this night. He’d had everything planned: their meeting and how he’d manage it.
He prepared to dive.
“Where are you going?” she cried. “Where’s your boat? You’re not going to swim, surely? Wait! I don’t even know who you are.”
He turned and gazed into her white, frightened face. He remembered the arrogant sway of her backside as she’d abandoned him in the Florian. He remembered the laughter, promising sin, and the smile, the devil’s own smile.
He felt a stab, as of loss, though he’d lost nothing, though he had nothing to lose. Yet he turned away from the water and, with wry resignation, toward her.
“I’m the fellow across the way,” he said.
An hour later
Francesca’s neighbor was taller than she’d estimated, based on glimpses of a silhouette in a window. She could not have guessed how splendidly made he was.
At the moment, the leanly muscled body was not so plainly on display as it had been a short while ago. The recollection, however, was burned into her mind, and it made her go hot and cold again as, clean and dry and freshly clothed, he sauntered into the small parlor she reserved, usually, for her close friends.
He wore a curious combination of articles borrowed from the largest of her servants. The shirt and coat were too short in the sleeves, the waistcoat was too loose, and the breeches too baggy. The shoes were neither too large nor too small, but her discerning eye told her they did not shape properly to his feet. Yet he wore the ill-fitting hodgepodge with the same cool assurance he’d displayed as he stood in her gondola, half-naked and dripping.
Francesca could have changed into a dressing gown over one of her naughty negligees. She might have made herself more comfortable in dishabille. She was a harlot, after all, and need not play the modest lady.
Your Scandalous Ways Page 5
